By Kelly Purcell

Director, B2B Marketing and Growth

Fairfax Media

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

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Over the past five years, Fairfax Media has developed a highly successful consumer subscription value proposition that meets the needs and values of individual subscribers. However, we knew that simply installing this consumer product into the corporate world ultimately wouldn’t work.

So we launched the corporate subscription value proposition:“See Every Article as an Opportunity” — an integrated campaign that demonstrated our flexible suite of subscription products that catered specifically to Australian businesses. We rolled this out through print and digital channels, targeted activations at business conferences and forums around Australia, and specialist outdoor media.

Our research had identified that a B2B (business to business) customer’s key need was ease of access. With this in mind, our corporate-centred products provided businesses with seamless access to content, including:

Site Licence: Hassle-free digital access for every employee on an organisation’s network with no need for passwords or e-mail addresses.

Enterprise Licence: Unlimited digital access for organisations across all devices with subscriptions verified by a business e-mail address, allowing for access from any location.

Group Subscriptions: Print or digital subscriptions for a group of nominated employees.

Stepping away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach meant our customers could choose the products that best fit their needs depending on their business priorities. Our approach improved both the user’s and customer’s experience of content access in a corporate environment. It also increased awareness of The Australian Financial Review (AFR), The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), and The Age, attracting significant new business.

Listening to the needs of businesses was key to understanding how best to offer content to corporate subscribers.

We’d also identified a secondary key need of our B2B customers: a demonstrated ROI. So we created a “Site Licence” dashboard, allowing businesses to track their staff subscription usage and highlight the value our products bring every day.

The dashboard created a transparent relationship between Fairfax Media and our corporate subscribers. By listening to the needs of businesses, we showed our corporate customers that we understood exactly how they wanted to access content across The AFR, The SMH, and The Age, as they looked to empower their teams.

Our insight-led approach to corporate subscriptions led to a 45% increase in Fairfax Media’s corporate footprint into Australian businesses since March 2016, as well as:

• Increasing B2B digital subscription revenue by 50% year-on-year.

• Tripling the number of AFR corporate subscribers since launch.

• Increasing traffic to the corporate subscriptions Web site by 900% in the first three months.

• Time spent on the AFR site increased by 800% for Site Licence users in the financial services industry and by 500% for Site Licence users within government organisations.

About Kelly Purcell

Kelly Purcell is director of B2B marketing and growth at Fairfax Media, Based in Sydney, Australia. She can be reached at kelly.purcell@fairfaxmedia.com.au.